While display surfaces of display devices, e.g., televisions, projectors, and desktop and laptop computers, are becoming physically larger and with an increased resolution, the manner in which images are displayed has remained much the same. In general, images produced for smaller display surfaces are simply scaled up to fill the entire larger display surface. Little is done to take full, advantage of what a large display surface has to offer. In addition, the aspect ratio of the display surface can often be different than the aspect ratio of the input image. In this, some means must be provided to reconcile the differences in aspect ratios.
For example, a high-definition television (HDTV), capable of displaying images with 1920×1080 pixels, takes a standard definition television signal with a resolution of 640×480 pixels, and simply scales the low-resolution images of the video to fill the entire high-resolution display surface, and perhaps cropping the sides.
Other examples of displaying low-resolution, images include preserving an original low resolution and/or aspect ratio of the images while rendering the images on a high-resolution display. In such examples, the image occupies just a portion of the display surface, which degrades a viewing experience. A typical example of such displaying method renders black bars on all sides of the images. This is called windowboxing.
Another example is rendering the video retrieved over the Internet in the video original format. In this example the video occupies relatively small portion, of the high-resolution video display.
Another example is letterboxing, where the aspect ratio of the input images is preserved, e.g., a HD signal is preserved in the output images for 4×3 SD display surface. Because the aspect ratio of the display surface is different, the resulting video must include masked-off areas or mattes above and below the output images.
Another example uses a pillarbox effect, which occurs in widescreen displays when black bars, mattes or masking, are placed on the left and right sides of the image.
Thus, typically the conversion uses windowboxing, pillarboxing, or letterboxing, with the mattes being black or unused.
Rendering images on just a portion of a display surface can lead to viewing fatigue, decrease realism and depth of an experience, and undermine the purpose and cost of high-resolution display surfaces.
One method to increase the viewing experience provides ambient light: in the room using “light speakers.” which depend on the video content, see U.S. Patent Application 20070091111 “Ambient Light Derived by Subsampling Video Content and Mapped Through Unrendered Color Space,” filed by Gutta and published on Apr. 26, 2007. That method requires additional, external to the viewing device, equipment, and may not be suitable for some type of displays and viewing conditions.
A video is composed of a sequence of video frames or images, which are often encoded and compressed to decrease bandwidth and memory requirements. Each frame is displayed independently of a previous or a next frame. It is desired to have a new way for rendering the images on a display surface, which has a different resolution or aspect ratio to increase viewing experience and without a need for any extra special equipment.